Text and textual information proliferates everyday life. Text presented in everyday life and in images may be incomprehensible for several reasons. For example, people suffering from poor vision or diseases of the eye may have difficulty reading text. In other instances, the text is incomprehensible because the reader does not understand the language.
A person suffering from poor visual acuity may not be able to discern the characters forming the text, in a picture or video, from the background of the text. Visually discerning text may be additionally difficult if the text is scripted, too small for observation (even for someone with normal vision), poorly written (presented), and so on. Languages which use many characters may be particularly difficult for people having poor vision as the reader may have to differentiate between several similar characters. The “written” or textual Chinese and Japanese languages may be particularly difficult as a large number of symbols are used to convey information, in comparison to Western languages in which a limited number of characters are implemented in a wide variety of combinations in order to communicate.
For persons unfamiliar with the language, non-comprehension occurs as the person does not posses the underlying knowledge of what information is being communicated. For example, a person conversant in the written English language may not understand French text. This comprehension issue may be particularly troublesome for people traveling in foreign countries. For example, a tourist traveling through Europe may be confronted with road-signs, menus, billboards or other text in several unfamiliar languages.